Viktória Fördős

Scale, Manage and Prevent!

Making distributed systems that scale to many machines is easier done with Erlang/OTP than most other technologies. Deploying, managing and monitoring thousands of Erlang nodes prepared for massive load, however, remains a tough (and repetitive) challenge. In the context of the EU funded RELEASE project, the main task of WombatOAM is to provide the scalable infrastructure for deploying thousands of Erlang nodes. It provides a broker layer capable of dynamically scaling heterogeneous cloud clusters based on capability profile matching.

In this talk, I will tell you how the scalability and robustness capabilities of WombatOAM were addressed, allowing us to deploy and monitor 10,000 Erlang nodes running an ant farm simulation in 4 minutes. The talk will cover the journey – focusing on the analysis of WombatOAM (using WombatOAM, as we like dog food), on the applied techniques and on the key decisions taken when advancing WombatOAM.

Talk objectives:

Learn how to detect bottlenecks in concurrent system.

Explore an approach to scaling Erlang clusters.

Discover how to predict and prevent possible outages.

Target audience:

Developers, Support and Operations staff who believe devops is the way (and do not want to be woken up at night).

Viktória first come in contact with Erlang in 2010 when she joined the RefactorErl project. Between 2012 and 2014, she worked as a researcher in RefactorErl and in the PharaPhrase FP7 EU-founded project. During this time she co-authored papers in the ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop, in ‘Proceedings of Trends in Functional Programming’ (TFP) and in ‘Lecture Notes in Computer Science’ (LNCS). She joined Erlang Solutions in 2014 and she is currently working on improving Wombat's scalability and robustness capabilities within the RELEASE FP7 EU research. Coincidentally, her favourite animals are wombats and hedgehogs.